


forever, with no horizon

by Shachaai



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Royalty, M/M, sorry Vicchan is still dead, the dogs are dragons and are still such good bbs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-02-18 13:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13101450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shachaai/pseuds/Shachaai
Summary: Yuuri Katsuki loves dragons. He has spent most of his life with dragons one way or another, hoping to serve the tsar he so admires and become a member of the tsar’s elite Konvoi: to wear the uniform and, from dragonback, protect the empire he now calls his home.Instead, he somehow ends up as a dragon scholar in the imperial nidus. Ground-crew. With a string of very public disasters to his name - including making a complete fool of himself in front of the imperial family.No matter what he loves, Tsar Viktor II’s first duty is to his empire, to try and avoid plunging his people back into a decades-long war that only just ended some time in his childhood. If that means long days, empty nights, and accepting a much-overdue gift of a highly-prized egg from the Emperor of Fusau so he can fly the dragon inside it rather than his own beloved Makkachin, so be it.Of course, he has toretrievesaid dragon egg himself first, and who better to educate and accompany him on his journey than the eminent dragon scholar working in his own nidus who has so recently caught his attention?





	1. that first glimpse of sky

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Hitsu, who, despite not even being a fan of this series, is pretty much the reason I had the courage to put this one out there.
> 
> This monster is absolutely inspired by the fantasy alternate history _Temeraire_ series by Naomi Novik, as well as _The Adamantine Palace_ , by Stephen Deas. So much fabulous fantasy politics with dragons. Everything is better with dragons.

The Ridged Shadowtooth is a beautiful dragon. Yuuri is not the only one who has paused in his work in the nidus at a quiet part of the day to come and see the lovely young lady staying with them for a few days; there’s a sizeable crowd of appreciative ground-crew around her assigned den-room by the time he gets there, some hours after she first arrived, and nidus gossip says that the numbers had been at least thrice that just an hour before. Still mostly ground-crew, but apparently there had also been more than a few off-duty members of the _Konvoi_ curious enough to poke their noses in as well as some of the lesser - and poorer - nobility come along with their personal servants to gawk.

None of the _Konvoi_ are around now that Yuuri can see, much to his relief. Even still wearing his loose body-harness for acclimatising the dragon kits in the upper nursery to their harnesses, its long tether-lines looped around Yuuri’s main waist-belt but still trailing their carabiners, and decked out in his nidus-issued blue surcoat (a sign that he is ground-crew and is therefore considered, to nobility, most of the _Konvoi,_ and other snobbish types that have permission to land their dragons at the Imperial Nidus of the Winter Palace, little better than invisible), Yuuri’s failure at the last spring trials for admission to the Tsar’s Own Escort, the _Konvoi,_ had been spectacular enough that people still occasionally recognise him and bring it up again.

At this point, Yuuri just wants himself and his one great and absolutely disastrous attempt to fulfill his childhood dream and join the tsar’s _Konvoi_ to be forgotten. Unfortunately, it is rather hard to forget the man who not only managed to come in _dead last_ in the latest trials, but _also_ managed to murder a palace rosebush and land his borrowed middleweight dragon for the trials, _injured,_ on the top of the afternoon tea-table where the tsarina had been entertaining the Lysian delegation outside in the rare clement weather. The tsarina had managed to escape the experience relatively unscathed, but the Lysian ambassador had ended up with meringue in her hair.

It is not the worst or even most embarrassing thing that Yuuri has ever done because Yuuri is a tragic disaster made flesh and even his friend, the ever-supportive Phichit Chulanont, cannot deny that Yuuri has _records,_ but Yuuri has no idea how he managed to come out of that particular royal, social and political disaster with his _life,_ never mind managing to keep his job at the nidus. Almost squashing the beloved mother of the ruling monarch and the diplomatic representative of another empire with a middleweight dragon, and definitely ruining their tea and snacks, is rather frowned upon.

“What a _beauty,_ ” a young harness-wrangler with very good taste breathes just in front of Yuuri. She clutches on to her friend (another harness-wrangler. Everyone who works in a nidus is called a harness-wrangler - regardless of if they have another occupation - if they’re young enough or just woefully short) beside her where they stand in the nidus’ main hall, just off from where the Ridged Shadowtooth has been given a private den-room for her stay at the Winter Palace.

The private den-room is a luxury afforded to the Shadowtooth because of her value, and the rank of her owner, though she is bound to one near the main hall - and its gawkers - as the more exclusive ones deeper into the nidus’ many expansive wings are kept for the kits of Yuuri’s nursery, the sick and quarantined dragons, and the personal dragons of the imperial family (and visiting royal guests). Most draconic guests to the nidus stay in the large Jasper Den Hall, which has a revolving set of empty nests, cubbies and caves to suit almost any weight of dragon of any type comfortably for at least a few days, although most who stay there temporarily are there for only a few hours. Some dinner and a quick nap to while away the time for a message delivery or during a ball, and then they’re gone.

The young Shadowtooth - barely more than a kit at eight months old but already the size of a low-ceilinged two storey house - is highly-expensive and the newest heavyweight of some Rassvetan count from the east, who had received the express permission of the tsar to rest his new Shadowtooth at the Winter Palace whilst flying her home across almost the entire expanse of the Rassvetan Empire. The poor sweetheart has landed herself a pompous name from her new owner for all her troubles - _Galatea,_ because apparently the count is fond of the western classics and had thought the young dragon rather ‘beautiful and statuesque’ -, but a great deal of admirers at the nidus attached to the Winter Palace, who see perhaps one Shadowtooth dragon per year.

Yuuri wants so badly to draw her.

The dragon in question is clearly enjoying being so admired - by little harness-wranglers on up to the ranked adults (armourers, surgeons and harness-masters alike) in the crowd nearby her -, sitting in the entrance to her private den-room like a tsarevna of dragons and basking in the adulation she deems justly deserved. Some of the ground-crew near her claws are quite audibly calling her ‘ _such_ a pretty thing,’ and Galatea responds by tossing back her large grey head in an obvious preening gesture. The move makes the afternoon light streaming in through the main hall’s gigantic open sky-door gleam silver on the ridges along the Ridged Shadowtooth’s snout that are her namesake - setting off another round of low appreciative _ooo_ s from the humans watching her.

A middleweight Green Archer dragon that has not long since come in through the sky-door and, busy with ground-crew, is in the process of having his cargo removed from his harness as his merchant rider reports to the main office just off the hall snorts in disgust at the whole affair. Yuuri cleans his glasses with the thumb of his gloves and replaces them on his face just in time to see the feather-like ruff behind the Archer’s jaw, that indicates the dragon’s sex, raise and flatten with one great unimpressed _huff_ of breath - which bowls over a small and unfortunate harness-wrangler who had been running in front of the Archer’s head at the time. The boy’s short, plain blue surcoat balloons like a ship’s mainsail and sends him flying a good few metres, the packs in his hands dropped to the floor.

Yuuri is not at all immune to the delight everyone (ignoring the Green Archer) is feeling in the presence of the Ridged Shadowtooth, moving a little closer to Galatea in her den. There aren’t many Ridged Shadowtooths in the world - perhaps less than a couple of hundred -, and even fewer, even now, that have a pure parentage like their current guest, with a Ridged Shadowtooth dragon as both sire and dam.

The breed is formed by crossbreeding the Rassevtan Ural Sawtooth with the Tundra Shadow dragon from further west. The cross of the two breeds, both on the smaller end of the heavyweight class of dragons due to the sparseness of their native environments, creates a heavyweight dragon larger than both its parents that is eminently suited to cold environments, whilst breeding out the Ural Sawtooth’s ugly temper and somewhat ‘unloveable’ appearance. (Yuuri _loves_ the Ural Sawtooth’s appearance, broad shoulders, weird wings, large serrated teeth and all. The Sawtooth has _character,_ and Yuuri will fight anyone who says otherwise. It isn’t the _dragon’s_ fault it looks like its face has been squashed from above with a large and heavy boulder and that it has then flown directly into a mountainside in panic. _Yuuri_ gets grumpy when people comment on his looks all the time, so the Sawtooth’s bad temper is quite understandable.) At the same time, the svelter but more mutely-coloured Tundra Shadow’s genes benefit from the addition of the Sawtooth’s gleaming edges, and some of the Sawtooth’s bulk increases the Shadow’s resistance to changeable and unforgiving conditions in both diet and environment.

The end result is an amicable grey, silver-lined middeclass heavyweight dragon, with a ridged face and teeth similar - but (thankfully) not identical - to a Sawtooth’s, and a Shadow’s grace of movement in the air and on land. On the other hand, the breed is also prone to vanity and possessiveness, and, due to its parentage (however distant) being of two dragon breeds from remote wintry - quiet, colourless - areas, can be easily spooked by sudden loud noises, bright lights and large fires.

Unfortunately, humans are very good at creating things like loud noises, bright lights and large fires, all at the same time. They get called _explosions._

To call the sound that follows, when another running harness-wrangler - his arms full of more cargo from the Archer - trips over the packs already dropped by his forebear before him on the floor, an explosion is a gross exaggeration. It is not an explosion, for the sound itself is not of something _exploding_ \- though it does, as a result, make the entire main hall of the nidus subsequently explode in panic.

Later, the details of the event will be revealed as thus: the running harness-wrangler tripped over the packs already dropped on the floor, and the packs in his arms hit the ground with him. Those packs, being some of the Green Archer’s rider’s _personal_ packs, contained some of the necessaries all riders kept by their sides whilst on dragonback - among which was a spare flintlock pistol, already pre-loaded with dry powder. (Even in peacetime dragon riders must occasionally defend themselves in air from attacks from either wild dragons, or thieves and rogues riding other dragons, and trying to get fine powder into a pistol - not to mention the shot after it - with the wind whipping in one’s face is damned difficult. Yuuri would know; he’s _tried._ )

Somehow, the packs and child hitting the floor made the pistol go off. Thankfully, with no shot inside, no-one was wounded by that immediate occurrence, but there _was_ a rather loud _bang -_ and in the cavernous main hall, it echoed to a sound ten times its size.

The bang had been the problem. The bang _is_ the problem, for, though no-one has any real idea what has caused it when the sound suddenly bursts through the air, everyone startles all the same - and no-one startles better than a nervous young dragon caught entirely unawares.

Galatea panics.

The first lesson taught the world over to _anyone_ who works with or lives near dragons is a pretty simple one, and Yuuri knows how to say it in four different languages so he will never, ever, forget: when confronted by an angry or panicking dragon, _immediately get out of the way._ Even the tiniest featherweight dragon can cause some serious damage when alarmed. Hitting someone at a dead run, some of the weightier of the featherweight breeds can have much the same effect as a small cannonball impacting with the human body: bones snap and organs burst and bleed.

The larger weight classes are even more dangerous. Yuuri has seen men and women crushed by stampeding dragons too panicked to realise there were humans underfoot, watched limbs broken and skulls cracked after people were flung into the floor, walls or once, horrifyingly, off a small _cliff_ after being caught by a dragon’s stray flailing wing or lashing tail. Many of the acid-spitting dragon breeds will instinctively spray whatever is in front of them with lethal acid when suddenly alarmed; startled fire-breathers are prone to staccato bursts of defensive flame, and, though the sudden fog that mist-callers will sometimes gather when thoroughly frightened is not immediately deadly, Yuuri has known the sudden descent of such adverse weather conditions to cause accidental injury and death.

The crowd around Galatea scatters in disarray as the dragon rears back on her hind legs with a tremendous alarmed roar, her wings instinctively unfurling from their smooth lines against her back. She is too close to the side of the entrance to her den-room when she does so; one wing slams into the supporting pillar and sends a shower of dust down on both the dragon and people below. The shock of the pain blinds Galatea further, and another, louder, roar shaken loose from deep in her belly makes the main hall tremble. When her forelegs hit the ground again, the shockwaves send some people stumbling, others to the floor: a surgeon on the floor only narrowly avoids being crushed under Galatea’s claws, but the force of her suddenly rushing past him sends him bouncing hard into a nearby wall.

The girls in front of Yuuri cry out when the very tip of Galatea’s tail, wild behind her, catches a swathe of harness-wranglers attempting to run away and sweeps them all into a pile of boxes and trunks with the same ease as a child tossing dry autumn leaves. Yuuri darts forward the last few steps between him and the children to bodily grab them both by the backs of their surcoats when they make to dash forwards to try and help their friends without a glance around themselves. They are both still screaming as he yanks them behind his back, but at least they are no longer diving blindly headlong into the path of the screeching Green Archer dragon - who has sensibly fled out of the way of the much larger Shadowtooth, but is injuring even more of the nidus ground-crew with his own panicking. His cargo scatters behind him, the mesh and harnesses keeping that _should_ be keeping it bound to his belly and sides open for unloading, and the sound of yelling people, screeching and roaring dragons, and precious cargo hitting human flesh and smashing and splintering under Galatea’s feet as she storms around the main hall is horrific.

More dragons and people have come running down the nidus’ wide hallways, brought by the chaos and, thus, adding to it, and ground-crew are trying to hold back and calm the other dragons - who have started to screech as well, alarmed by a panicking heavyweight. _Their_ noise is working Galatea up further, and Yuuri sees the moment the Ridged Shadowtooth’s beautiful blue eyes swivel from the carnage of the main hall to the vast blue sky beyond the yawning sky-door, open and quiet and _away._

Galatea hasn’t been trained or cleared for riderless flight yet. She’s such an expensive dragon, she might _never_ be, but, at the moment, she is still too young and too new to this part of Rassveta - over the capital, Moyka - for it to be at all advisable. Since she is supposed to be _resting,_ she isn’t even wearing her flying harness.

“Don’t,” says Yuuri uselessly, as though Galatea could hear his small, pleading voice across the terrified, screaming mess that is currently the main hall of the Winter Palace’s nidus. Looking between Shadowtooth and the beckoning promise of the sky-door, and _willing_ Galatea to hear him and understand.

Galatea takes off at a dead run for the door.

Yuuri doesn’t even hear one of the crying girls behind him sob out a bewildered _Master?_ as he moves forwards away from her and her friend _,_ thinking he is speaking to her. His head is in his heart and his heart is in his mouth, thudding in time with each of Galatea’s thunderous feet hitting the floor as she runs, faster and faster, for the open door and the freedom beyond.

Yuuri hears the girl’s second _Master?!_ if only because she shrieks it in terrified confusion. Her fear seems a very strange and distant thing to Yuuri in that moment: something calm and clear has slotted itself into place in his mind, as clean and simple as riding a dragon up, _up,_ beyond the clouds on a sunny day with nothing but the endless blue sky above and the wind in Yuuri’s ears drowning out the world. A sound so great it is an absence of sound, an absence of anything but _being,_ human body and dragon body working together seamlessly without thought.

Afterwards, no-one - not even Yuuri, nor the girls who _had_ actually been watching him - will be able to say exactly how it was that Master Yuuri Katsuki managed to get himself up onto the frightened Green Archer’s back (especially not without severe injury). Most had not been watching him, and the Archer had already been turning to the sky-door after Galatea under Yuuri’s direction as Yuuri was still clipping the carabiners of his training harness to the Archer’s more weathered flying one. The great shadow of the heavyweight Shadowtooth immediately taking flight the moment she broke free of the nidus’ walls and her panicked _roar_ had obscured the moment when Yuuri’s hands had gripped tight on the Archer’s reins.

Silence does not immediately fall in the nidus. With Galatea gone, there is a queer, horrified lull in the chaos, the eye of a storm. All eyes are drawn to the injured who need help and to the sky-door where their precious Ridged Shadowtooth had disappeared, the dragon liable to leash hell on everyone she meets out there - including Rassveta’s _capital city._

Yuuri thinks none of this and all of this precisely. The blue sky burns his eyes in the door’s silhouette, the sky-road after the scared dragon who needs to be brought back before she hurts herself. Yuuri is already with her in his mind’s eye, soothing her fright and streaking mercury silver over Moyka’s peculiar sprawl.

It is nothing then to shift his weight in the Green Archer’s saddle, leaning in, digging in his heels the way he learnt at his teacher’s knee, and flicking the reins of his mount as easy as his next breath of: _“Go."_

In a tremendous thunder of boxes and bags - the last of the Green Archer’s doomed cargo falling out of his netting and smashing to pieces on the ground -, the Green Archer dragon takes off at an unstoppable run for the sky-door, immediately launching into the sky beyond it with an exhilarating sweep of his sharp, curved-bow wings - intent after Galatea, with Yuuri on his back.

 

 

*****

 

 

Yuuri Katsuki saw his first dragon when he was no more than half an hour old. This is what his father says, anyway, and Toshiya Katsuki is not a man known for his flights of fancy. Family, friends, neighbours and customers at his ryokan and its attached onsen: all who know him have always said Toshiya Katsuki’s word is worth more than gold - his home, Hasetsu, is a backwater town; people there pay with more than just semi-useless coin -, and that his greatest sole delusion is in believing that his joke about the foolish man, the clever hungry seal and a rapidly depleting basket of fish is still funny forty-odd years after he first told it.

(“It was never funny to _begin_ with,” Minako Okukawa, Yuuri’s godmother, once confided in Yuuri’s and his mother’s hearing, sprawled out over a table in the ryokan’s dining room and halfway on her way to knocking out the six year-old Yuuri beside her with the alcoholic fumes in her breath alone. Minako-sensei has always hit her alcohol _hard._ “Hiroko, if you weren’t so sickeningly and happily _married_ I’d scold you for giving up the sky for a man who makes jokes about _fish._ ”)

Yuuri Katsuki had seen his first dragon when he was no more than half an hour old, cradled in his father’s loving arms and in the beautiful padded silk blanket that had been a gift for his birth from Minako. Hiroko Katsuki’s labour had been a long one and Yuuri had been born quite late in the day - in the last light of the day, since evening fell so early at the start of winter. Only underfoot in the birthing room as the women of Hasetsu attended his tired wife, Toshiya had taken his newborn son out to the ryokan’s small garden, and the sky overhead had been streaked orange and gold and crimson with the goodnight blessing of the goddess of the sun. The shadows around them had been soft, and dark, and long - and the shadow that had crossed the sky above Toshiya’s head had been all those things and _more,_ a black shadow flying high enough its edges were smudged and the beating of its huge wings did not breeze the ground.

At the sight of the dragon, Yuuri, who had worried his mother and her attendants when he had waited a whole minute after being born to start crying (and so already had a reputation for being a _peculiar_ child), had pushed one small, chubby hand out from underneath the warmth of his blankets, stretched it up towards the already distant shadow, and cooed.

 

 

*****

 

 

Standing in her office, stripped of his flying harness and missing his sole pair of glasses, Yuuri has to reassure himself in an ever quieter and more frantic little voice inside his mind that he is very, very honoured to be working at the Imperial Nidus of the Winter Palace and it is very, very unlikely that Her High Excellency Countess Lilia Feltsman, Grandmistress of the Imperial Nidus of the Winter Palace and his immediate superior, would eat him. Lilia and her particular standards abhor having to find replacements for the higher ranks in her nidus, and, besides, declaring humans an acceptable food source would set a very bad example for the dragons.

None of this information is doing anything for the very small, shivering and animal part of Yuuri’s brain that insists Lilia is going to eat him. Even with her form made blurry by the fact Yuuri’s glasses have just been dropped somewhere over the middle of Moyka - along with his dignity and any hope he is going to improve his reputation at the Winter Palace any time soon -, Yuuri can squint enough to see that Lilia (distinctive by her dark hair, frighteningly perfect posture, and tall leanness that reminds one of an apex predator on the thin side of winter), who has somehow mastered the art of looming over her desk at those unfortunate enough to be on the other side of it and her displeasure by simply by raising her eyebrow, is not happy with him.

So be it. Yuuri is not ashamed of the results of his actions, though hindsight is suggesting he could probably have found a better way of going about achieving them. A way that does not have him weary in front of his superior and wondering whether he is still going to have a job in the next few minutes.

Lilia has not offered Yuuri a chair. Yuuri, windswept, heartsore and not too long off dragonback after some serious flying that has strained at least five of his muscles that he had forgotten he even _has_ , pointedly does _not_ shift his weight from one foot to the other. (The animal part of him - Yuuri is convinced it’s a rabbit - is strongly hoping that if Yuuri doesn’t move, the thing with teeth that is so unhappy with him will forget he’s even there.

Alas, it doesn’t work.)

“You understand,” says Lilia, in that clear crisp way of hers that echoes perfectly down the nidus’ hallways without her raising her voice and turns blood to ice and hearts to stone, “that the stunt you just pulled would normally result in most people losing their lives rather than just their glasses?”

Yuuri is too tired to wince. “Yes, your ladyship.” Lilia might be an excellency through her marriage, but she is countess by her own right: calling her e _xcellency_ in the nidus is the best way to vex the grandmistress and get assigned something horrible as a duty. Yuuri really does not need to vex the grandmistress further.

“And that I have a very angry merchant rabbiting my ear off, insisting that you be arrested for the theft of his dragon and the loss or destruction of a third of his cargo?”

No doubt the merchant will claim for more. Yuuri had heard some of the things the man - brave and stupid to try yelling at Lilia - after he had returned to the nidus riding a calmed Galatea. None of the things he had had to say about Yuuri at the top of his voice had been complimentary, insults ringing in the cowed silence of the nidus as some of the ground-crew had hurried up to help Yuuri dismount from Galatea and lead the dragon away to a den-room deeper inside the nidus and further away from the sky-door.

Lilia’s response had been too low to hear and freezing in tone. Yuuri does not want to know what she had said, because what she had said had silenced the merchant at once. It had been easier, instead, to focus on clamping down firmly around the hurt in his heart and the speaking fixtures of his expression, to feel and display nothing even as the Green Archer had finally flown into the nidus riderless behind Yuuri - for very few of the ground-crew had dared to look Yuuri in the eyes after his return, and, out of those that had, their glances had been fleeting, awed, and fearful.

(Outsider once more.)

Yuuri murmurs again: “Yes, your ladyship.”

For a few moments, Lilia does not speak, pulling out her own chair with all the refinement of a lady of her class and taking a seat. Intelligent, dangerous, and poised, she reminds Yuuri very much of Minako in such thread-sharp moments; Minako-sensei, too, had always known how to use even silence as a threat.

The silence is broken by Lilia. Firstly by her pale hand, coming down to rest atop the blurred mess of leather and metal on her desk that is the flying harness that had been promptly and silently stripped from him by his colleagues before being handed over to Lilia; it jingles, the sound of metal and wood, and Yuuri’s spine straightens further in instinct and foreboding.

Secondly: “Have you any explanation for yourself?”

Yuuri only has the truth - or as much of it he can recall. The pure clearheadedness that had occupied his earlier seizure of the Green Archer and subsequent wild flight over Moyka to leap onto the frantically fleeing Galatea’s back has left him now, and the fragments of his logical process at the time with it.

“I only thought to retrieve the Shadowtooth, your ladyship.” Yuuri sensibly does not add: _and I_ retrieved _her, thank you very much, safe and sound and in a better state than when she left._ _The Green Archer as well._ “She is so young, and not cleared for flight without a rider, and she could have been hurt flying away in a panic like that. I -” Yuuri cannot help worrying his lip slightly, unable to watch the minute shifts in Lilia’s expression on the other side of the desk with his eyesight so impaired, “I couldn’t let that happen? The palace could have been damaged too. And Moyka. The shame -”

The Winter Palace had once been precisely what it had been named - the palace in which the Rassvetan imperial family only resided in winter. But several generations ago, the Serebryannoe Palace had been burned down by dragonflame - and Rassveta’s capital city of the time, Gatchina, with it.

Moyka is still called the Rassvetan New Capital by the generation that would be Yuuri’s great-grandparents, were they still alive, and the Nidus of the Winter Palace is now the greatest one remaining in the empire.

“I was there,” Yuuri says simply, unable to find better words. “and the Green Archer was there, and we were both in harness. So I just -”

“Stole him,” Lilia supplies.

“ _Borrowed_ him,” Yuuri corrects, too stung to fear for his life. Temporarily.

Lilia does not kill him for it, which is a worthy feat in itself right up until she corrects him dryly in return. “Borrowing without permission is classed as theft, Master Katsuki. Especially so when you do not bring back that which you ‘borrowed’ once you are finished.” Yuuri opens his mouth (apparently his rabbit-brain is having fun riding the high of suicidal recklessness today) - “The Archer flew back himself - which is a credit only to his own training rather than your abrupt handling of him today. The last time I witnessed flying so suicidally reckless was during the war, and we picked up the pieces of the corpse who attempted it off the ground after a five hundred foot fall for his efforts. How far did you drop from his back to the heavyweight’s today? It looked in excess of sixty foot.”

Yuuri closes his mouth again, because he really cannot recall. Lets his posture slump. If Lilila had seen enough of his flying to have noted his exact manoeuvres, then most of the nidus had probably seen it through quickly found-or-purloined spyglasses as well. “...Yes, your ladyship.”

“Master Katsuki, why have you only applied to join the _Konvoi_ once?”

Yuuri looks up again. Lilia had not added _when you have been here almost two years, and a Rassvetan citizen longer than that?_ but Yuuri had heard it anyway. He has been asked the same question before.

His answer has not changed much over the years.

“I wanted to wait,” Yuuri says, “until I was good enough -” he has to swallow, then, around the sudden hard lump in his throat, “until I thought I was good enough to pass.”

There is a long pause, Lilia no doubt waiting for some better explanation from Yuuri to fill it, her gaze sharp enough Yuuri does not need his sight to feel it digging into his skin. Once more, Yuuri is inadequate to expectations.

“I see,” Lilia says at last, bland enough that Yuuri knows she sees more than he would like her to. And then she moves on, brisk as whiplash: “We budget for accidents like today, so the full nature of today’s events need not trouble the Palace further. The nidus will reimburse the merchant for half the damage to his goods, and the Shadowtooth’s owner may foot the rest of the cost, to, combined, cover up to two-thirds of the worth of the goods.”

“You’re going to bill a _count?_ ” Yuuri gawks.

“I frequently bill the tsar,” says Lilia, which is - yes - a good point. “It was the count’s dragon that caused most of the damage due to her youth and insufficient training so far, and the nidus’ fault for most of the arrangement of affairs that caused such chaos today. Our mercantile friend is responsible for the rest.”

Judging by the yelling earlier, their ‘mercantile friend’ is probably not going to be very happy with that.

“The nidus will pay for your replacement glasses.”

Yuuri gawks at Lilia again, even more unattractively than the first time. He has to bite down - _hard -_ on his tongue to prevent his instinctive flail of _you mean I’m_ not _fired?!,_ but only ends up making an embarrassingly unintelligible gargled noise instead.

The grandmistress lifts her eyebrow high enough that Yuuri doesn’t even have to squint to see it. “You must agree they are cheaper by far than the medical bills for an injured Ridged Shadowtooth belonging to a count? Since your earlier endeavour - however rash - managed to return her safe and unharmed, and the Green Archer returned as well, it seems only fitting you are reimbursed in some way. Have them bill the nidus directly.”

Despite watching his family light incense at their household shrine for many of his formative years, and bowing his own head in prayer to the gods from time to time, Yuuri is not accustomed to witnessing miracles.

“I - _yes,_ ” he stammers, dipping his head in stunned gratefulness, “of course. Thank you, your ladyship.” He can stay at the nidus. _He can stay at the nidus._

“Until you have you have received them,” says Lilia, interrupting the rush of relief still sweeping through Yuuri and stilling it, something instinctive hanging warily on her words, “I think it best if you occupy your time by testing the new crates of carabiners that arrived a few days ago, currently in storeroom fifteen.” Yuuri winces. “To thoroughly remind you of the importance of one’s carabiners being whole and _wholly attached_ from line to the dragon’s harness at all times whilst airborne,” Lilia adds archly, just in case Yuuri might miss her point.

“Of course, your ladyship,” is all Yuuri can say, dipping his head again in the hopes his dark fringe might hide the resignation in his eyes.

Testing carabiners is the task given to new ground-crew at the nidus, or to people who have firmly planted themselves in Lilia’s bad books. It’s a necessary job but _nobody_ likes to do it, as, at best, the task is long, mindnumbingly boring, and thoroughly exhausting. Each clip must be tested individually for its strength under stress, which involves whichever unfortunate soul who has the tester’s job that day to attach a single clip to a truly uncomfortable harness (ground-crew do _not_ get nice harnesses), climb a ladder attached to the wall in the tester’s alcove in the secondary equipment room, and clip themselves on to a horizontal bar that runs from wall to wall just below the lowered ceiling. And then hang there with only the clip for support for five minutes.

If the clip holds, and shows no cracks once the tester has unclipped themselves and either climbed back down the ladder or jumped down onto the sackcloth safety mattress below the bar, it passes the test.

On a good day, the worst part of the experience for Yuuri is the burn in his thighs from climbing the ladder so many times and the dizzying rush of blood to his head when he first releases the bar and leans back to let the clip he’s testing take his full weight.

On a bad day, the worst part is when the clips fail to hold Yuuri’s weight and snap, sending him plummeting down into the mattress below. Smacking his head off sackcloth rattles his brains, and the straw it’s stuffed with invariably smells fusty and pokes through the material to stab Yuuri ruthlessly in his soft parts. (Yuuri has a great many soft parts.)

Invariably, almost a full tenth of carabiners fail the stress test. Testing the clips means hitting the mattress a _lot,_ and Yuuri _already_ aches all over. His aches have aches.

“In addition to your regular basic duties, of course,” Lilia finishes, because she _hates Yuuri,_ and then nudges his harness back over the desk to him with her outstretched hand. The final jingling, jangling nail in his coffin.

Yuuri takes it back with a grimace poorly masquerading as a smile.

He almost wishes he _had_ been fired.


	2. a love of dragons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all your kind words last chapter! I've had some technology woes lately so I've been rather absent, but everything seems to be fixed (for now).

Yuuri’s day does not drastically improve. Since Lilia has given him carabiners to test on top of his basic duties, Yuuri thinks it wisest to attend to those ‘basic’ duties first before embarking on anything else - and so must wearily trudge his way back to the nidus’ nursery area, his returned training harness dangling limply from one hand.

The nursery, like much of the nidus from what Yuuri has seen and heard after returning with Galatea, is something of a mess. A mess clearly on its - painfully slow - way to being set right again, but still a mess. Yuuri has to enter his domain using the human-sized door set into the - usually open and now tellingly closed - dragon-sized door, and the scene on the other side fills him with dismay.

The main hallway leading to the nursery exits to a wide terrace area, used for temporary storage and nosy people and dragons with permission to come and see the eggs and/or kits. Immediately beyond that is a gradual ramp downwards into what everyone at the nidus lovingly calls ‘the Cradle’: a large, (roughly) circular chamber that serves as the nursery’s main hall, with further rooms and hallways coming off it. The Cradle usually has a low hum of activity to it - a dozen or so ground-crew, one or two _Konvoi_ members or other riders, and the same amount of toddling dragon kits -, but, even standing at the top of the ramp and having to squint without his glasses, Yuuri can see the chamber is far busier than normal, with blurry ground-crew dashing about in harried motions, and at least four kits scampering about where they definitely should _not_ be, chased after by increasingly desperate people. The air is full of cross words and running feet, and high above that, the loud and reedy wailing of many, many young dragons crying.

It looks like a headache, but, dismayed as he is, Yuuri is not particularly _surprised._ A panicking heavyweight’s cries echo only too well through the stone cliff that the nidus is built into, and one dragon upset does tend to upset others of its kind, especially the young, nervous, and impressionable ones. The shut door will have stopped the kits from getting out into the rest of the nidus, but many of the dragon kits are still damnably smart enough to cause havoc _without_ needing to leave the nursery.

Yuuri spends the next hour and a half hour shooing kits and having his ears talked off by the people who work under him. His three undermasters have done their best to set the nursery to rights and they all bring him updates on the chaos promptly, but Yuuri, as Master of the Nursery, must still check off on all their reports - and one particularly troublesome dragon kit had managed to break down the door of Yuuri’s office under the Cradle’s ramp before being hustled straight back to her nest, which means, when Yuuri arrives at the scene of the crime some time later to dump his harness, his office looks like someone has murdered a giant baklava made of paperwork and regret inside of it - not entirely too different, Yuuri inwardly sighs before getting down on his hands and knees amongst the graveyard of his office filing system, from the desk in his own chamber in the nidus dorms. He has to find the _old_ reports to compare his undermasters’ updates to before any of their updates can officially be recorded as a good thing.

They currently have thirty-two dragon eggs in the hatchery: three of which are close to hatching, and one of those three is in the second nursery den-room with its brooding dam - a fussy Horned Thunder dragon named Shura. They currently have forty-six dragon kits in the Beryl, Quartz and Carnelian Den Halls - not one a day over six months, although five edging very close, and all needing to be accounted for -, and three further kits outside of the nursery, at the infirmary.

All of these are things Yuuri knows. All of these are things Yuuri _knows_ he knows, as he updates himself on all the numbers and the details of the nursery - _his_ nursery - first thing every morning every day, as well as when he returns from lunch, before he leaves the nursery in the evening, and on those nights there has been an emergency or he cannot sleep and he ends up in the nursery anyway. Still, he must double-check everything anyway.

Yuuri’s undermasters all greatly assist with that arduous task because they are all gifts from the gods and slightly terrify Yuuri, not least because they all seem to, by all appearances, _like him._ The only people whom Yuuri can deal with liking him all currently live in another empire. Yuuri cannot even deal with _himself_ for more than a day without having a serious falling-out of some sort that leads to him locking himself in his room in the dorms and binge-eating honey cakes dunked in increasingly questionable sweet pastes with whatever alcohol is to hand instead of going to dinner, so the continuing presence of three (three!) whole people in his life who, yes, are getting paid to put up with him whether they like him or not, but still act like they _genuinely_ like having his company and often ask for updates on his life, health and wellbeing whilst talking about their own lives, is. Something.

Alarming, mostly.

Two of them still smile at Yuuri when Yuuri mixes up their names. During the first month that Yuuri had worked at the Winter Palace, he had referred to all three of his undermasters by their title and surnames: Undermaster Gorelov, Undermaster Yeryomina, and Undermaster Kozlovsky, even though Darya Yeryomina had started affectionately(?) calling him Master Yuuri instead of Master Katsuki after the first week. Bogdan Gorelov had picked up on it a few days later, his grin wide and cheerful enough at Darya’s side that Yuuri had been _fairly_ certain that the two of them were doing it to be friendly rather than deride him, though Darya seemed to have taken it as a challenge of some sorts, puffing up under Bogdan’s patronising elbow on her shoulder and immediately coming out with: “So now, Master Yuuri, you really _must_ call me Dasha!”

Yuuri had demurred, even more so after Bogdan had said that if Darya was Dasha, _he_ was Bogdasha. (“And Miron is Miron,” Darya had went on a little dubiously, referring to their stoic third colleague, Kozlovsky, who often only said one word to Bogdan’s three and Darya’s ten. “Otherwise he might feel left out?”) Yuuri had _kept_ demurring right up until the one month mark, when Darya had asked him to call her Dasha (“or Undermaster Dasha, if it makes you more comfortable!”) again and Yuuri had crumpled like a dancing slipper in the snow because the woman in front of him had looked two seconds away from crying and _Yuuri cannot handle people crying in front him, ever._

So Undermaster Yeryomina is now Dasha, Undermaster Gorelov is now Bogdasha, and Undermaster Kozlovsky is now Miron - even though Yuuri is certain the latter man only puts up with being called Miron since Darya does _insist_ so. Miron still calls Yuuri _Master Katsuki,_ and flushes deep red across his cheekbones every time Yuuri calls him Miron to his face.

(“If he acts like that when you just call him Miron,” Darya had said rather too thoughtfully for Yuuri’s comfort the first time she had seen Miron’s reaction to Yuuri saying his name, “perhaps you should start calling him _Ronya._ ”

Western Rassvetan diminutives and nicknames are a mire that Yuuri had been and still is willing to wade in no further. _“No,_ Dasha.”)

Unfortunately for Yuuri, _Dasha_ and _Bogdasha_ are. Well. Yuuri, distracted, on more than one occasion, has asked someone to fetch Dasha for him, only for the woman to come running, and Yuuri, mortified, to realise his mistake - only to then blurt out the even more incriminating: “I’m so sorry; I meant the _other_ Dasha!”

( _Other Dasha._ The nursery ground-crew had whispered about it for a while afterwards: Bogdan had gotten very, very drunk that evening. Yuuri had tried sending him rosewater meringues, specially ordered from a bakery in Moyka because Bogdan had often mentioned he liked them and suggested he and Yuuri go to the bakery on their next day off to try them, as an apology. Yuuri had always thanked him for the recommendation, but told Bogdan not to wait for him to go to the bakery; as a master, Yuuri has few days off, and they very rarely match up with his undermasters’.

Bogdan had gotten even drunker.)

Yuuri stays in the nursery long enough to set most of his office to rights and to check that all eggs and kits are accounted for and have suffered no injury or other damage. Overseeing the rest of the clean-up effort is delegated to Bogdan (Miron is better suited to handling brooding dams and the eggs, whilst Darya can fluster runaway kits back into their den halls by talking at them), with the firm note that Yuuri is to be fetched from stress-testing carabiners in the secondary equipment room _immediately_ should anything come up.

“So it is true what they’re saying, Master Yuuri?” Bogdan asks before Yuuri can run away, the undermaster’s eyes too bright for someone who is _supposed_ to be re-sorting the many muddled papers in his superior’s office. “About you and the Shadowtooth? Since the grandmistress has you testing clips.”

When the nursery’s door is shut, it can take a while for rumours to filter down into the Cradle from the rest of the nidus. It is probably the reason why Yuuri hasn’t been swamped with gossip on top of runaway dragon kits, so he should - just as probably - feel grateful for the temporary reprieve from his colleagues’ vicious tongues.

Yuuri does not feel terribly grateful. Yuuri feels tired and sore, a hollow little ache opened up beneath his breastbone, and his grimace at Bogdan says as much. “I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know what people are saying, and I don’t _want_ to know. I’ll be back this evening before the last dinner bell,” he continues, hastily cutting in over whatever his undermaster might have to say when Bogdan opens his mouth again, ignoring the way it makes the other man frown. “You know where to send messages if you need me.”

Yuuri escapes - if resigning himself to hours of labour and landing in a thump on wretched straw counts as escape. People leave him alone, preoccupied with the late arrival of Grand Prince Nikolai and his grandson, Prince Yuri, for the Council meeting that should have happened in the morning, but the crates of new carabiners in the storeroom make up for it in their viciousness. They are _not_ kind to Yuuri, and, after hauling all of them to the tester’s alcove, Yuuri finds perhaps one in every seven of the clips he tries failing him. That’s a great deal worse than average, and if Yuuri, after only half an hour’s bruising work and facedown in musty sackcloth and straw for the _n_ th time, finds himself muttering some impolite things about the smiths that made the carabiners that his mother would definitely disapprove of, nobody needs to know exactly what he said except himself and the straw.

The straw deserves it anyway, as one particularly sharp and unkind piece has stabbed itself through the sacking and keeps trying to take out Yuuri’s eyeballs every time he is unfortunate to land on it facedown.

Dinner in the nidus is served between six o’ clock and twenty minutes past eight o’ clock in the evening, with bells rung every hour and half hour. Since there are nearly no clocks except in various offices, and very few of the ground-crew wear pocket watches, people - and clever dragons possessing the knowledge of their mealtime schedules - use the food hall’s bells to tell the time, and to know when many of their work shifts begin, break, and end.

Yuuri lets the first three dinner bells sound before he starts cleaning up his late afternoon’s work, dropping back down to the floor with a relieved sigh and tossing the last - passing - carabiner from his harness into the crate he had been steadily filling with its equally successful kin - marked PASS on the lid, with Yuuri’s signature, so some poor soul will not get the redundant job of re-testing them by accident. The failed carabiners go into an empty reject barrel at the side, for somebody to take back to the smithy with some serious complaints about just how _full_ the barrel is.

The fourth dinner bell sounds just as Yuuri has gotten back to the nursery. Bogdan’s eyes light up the moment he sees Yuuri set foot in the Cradle with the knowledge that his own freedom is now soon at hand, hurrying over. “Master Yuuri, I just finished briefing Miron about what has happened whilst you were away.”

Yuuri tries stretching as subtly as possible, all his muscles stiffening up horribly the moment he stands still. “Anything serious?”

“No,” Bogdan shakes his head quickly. His work shift began well before the first lunch bell and ended with the fourth dinner bell, and it is clear that he’s hungry, but Yuuri knows his undermasters well enough to know that none of them would gloss over something important about their charges simply for food, “nothing.”

So Yuuri takes pity on his subordinate (perhaps, if the heavens notice, the day might finally take pity on _him_ ). “Then I will go talk to Miron for the details. Goodnight, Bogdasha.”

“Goodnight, Master Yuuri!”

Miron, fresh from his own dinner and overseeing the night shift that night, does not have a great deal to say. The nursery has been put to its usual rights again whilst Yuuri had been away, and all dragon kits calmed. The door to Yuuri’s office is still broken rather magnificently, but it has been arranged that someone will be coming to replace it in the morning.

“You should go eat, Master Katsuki,” Miron tells him quietly, on the tail-end of his report. “If you haven’t already. You look tired.”

“I am,” Yuuri admits, too weary to pretend otherwise. He _should_ go get food now; anyone arriving after the last call for meals must content themselves with food from the limited daily cold stores, unless they have special allowance from the grandmistress, the tsar or tsarina, or the nidus physician. “I will be in my room in the dorms tonight, if anybody needs me.”

Miron has the politeness to only nod rather than saying anything about how nobody expects Yuuri to be anywhere _else_ at night rather than in his own room in the dorms - Yuuri has spent every night there since he first arrived at the Winter Palace, alone, saving those nights he covered the night shift and stayed in the Cradle instead. Even accounting for his occasional insomniac jaunts around the nidus to go and tell some of the dragons just how pretty and wonderful they are, Yuuri has always ended up back in his own cold bed before morning came.

Yuuri goes to the main food hall rather than the masters’ mess, keeping his head down and finding a seat at one of the long benches where he isn’t have to jostling anyone’s elbows. All the nidus masters and undermasters (as well as the grandmistress, though she frequently eats in the main palace with her husband) are entitled to use the mess for mealtimes, but the room is so quiet it would be impossible for him to enter and _not_ be drawn into conversation with anyone else there. The food hall, on the other hand, is always noisy and full of hundreds of people during meals, and Yuuri can usually blend in anonymously with the crowds there, even with his distinctive embroidered master’s surcoat on.

Dinner is shchi served with small baked potatoes, already salted and buttered, on the side. The shchi is still steaming hot when Yuuri pulls off his gloves and dips his spoon into it, stirring in some of the generous dollop of sour cream sitting in the middle of the bowl, so Yuuri puts the utensil aside for the moment and reaches for one of the little loaves of black rye bread that fill baskets up and down all the tables in the food hall, tearing it up into smaller pieces to dip into his soup instead.

The hot food is a balm. Yuuri manages to eat most of his potatoes and a few chunks of shchi-soaked bread before he notices _eyes_ watching him: two young men, a little further down the table, who immediately stop talking and look down at their food when Yuuri lifts his head to look at them.

The bread and potatoes suddenly feel like hard rocks in Yuuri’s belly, boulders at the bottom of a chasm. He lowers his gaze again, trying to concentrate on his meal and finish, at least, the bread in his hand, but it looks unappetising now, too heavy to chew. Yuuri drops it in his bowl and tries a few spoonfuls of the shchi alone, but its taste seems too sour now on his tongue, his stomach curdling in complaint.

Yuuri should eat. Yuuri should eat and finish his meal because he has done a lot of hard labour today and his body needs the energy to make up for it, but he can feel the men down the table looking at him again, little quick surreptitious glances whose movements catch at the corner of Yuuri’s eye. They won’t be the only ones doing so; Yuuri’s shoulders hunch up, breath quickening. He is too aware of strange eyes fixed on him but he is unable, without his glasses, to clearly see and count them all; past a few feet away his surroundings are loud, colourful blurs. Most of the room could be talking about him and Yuuri wouldn’t be able to see them.

Somewhere behind Yuuri a woman laughs, piercing above the background noise, and it breaks the dam holding up Yuuri’s nerve. The hum of the crowded food hall immediately washes over him like a wave, roaring white noise in his ears and drowning out everything but the need to be _away_.

Looking at nothing and no-one, Yuuri drops his spoon and, quickly, jerkily, stands, stepping over the bench he had been sitting on and taking the remainder of his food to scrape out in the disposal for the pigs on the palace estates. Then, in precisely the same way, does not blindly run all of the way out of the food hall and through the nidus to its attached dorms.

Yuuri has no memory of how he got back to his room and ended up sitting on his bed, his boots still on and his legs drawn up to his chest, nor of anyone who may have spoken to him or anything else of note he may have passed on his way. Yuuri isn’t even entirely sure how long he has been sitting there, breathing quick and sharp into his knees, only that when his heartbeat begins to slow and his head is- his head is less _full,_ he realises that he is sitting on three papers he left on his bed that morning, his room is dark and cold, and he has tracked his dirty boots across the expanse of his floor and up onto his bed-linen.

The house-proud part of Yuuri that was lovingly instilled in him by being brought up by _civilised people_ in a _ryokan_ inwardly shrieks in horror, and Yuuri whips off his boots and throws them with extreme prejudice at his chamber door.

Candles are easily lit, the papers - covered in notes on some of the nursery’s rarer eggs - are dumped on Yuuri’s desk, and the cold room problem is solved by Yuuri shuffling over to his stove in his plain wool stockings. None of the private rooms in the dorms are big enough for a traditional Rassvetan tile stove - oven and hearth both, and large enough to lie on when it gets very cold in winter -, but as a master of the nidus Yuuri has a bigger room than a lot of others (and doesn’t have to share his room like the youngest harness-wranglers do), so can afford the space for a little fat potbelly stove made of cast iron up against one wall beside his bed, desk, table and chairs. It eats through wood tremendously in the winter, but the expense and effort of obtaining the fuel is worth the blessed _warmth_ it radiates out into Yuuri’s chamber, and its flat top allows Yuuri to boil water easily and cook things with his small collection of pots and pans.

Yuuri waits until the fire has taken hold inside his stove before taking off his surcoat and stockings and getting his things ready to go to the showers - after a long day of hard work, he really does need a thorough wash. A relaxing hot bath after washing would be best for all his aches and pains, but Yuuri is too tired in body and spirit to spend a lot of time boiling enough water to fill his wooden bath-tub, or to go to the bath-house set aside for the nobility at the palace, or, even further, to one of the many bath-houses down in Moyka.

Instead, Yuuri has to settle for the dorm showers alone. It takes at least two people to work one shower - one person to work the pump for the water, the other to use the shower -, but Yuuri has always found the showers are particularly crowded whenever he is trying to use them anyway, even with men and women segregated between two different rooms. Offering to pump the water for someone else’s shower always ends with the favour immediately repaid, so, when Yuuri spots one blurry young man standing alone by a shower not in use and looking around in a vaguely hopeful manner, Yuuri heads his way and offers his help. The offer is gratefully received, so Yuuri puts down his things, pulls off his shirt over his head, and gets to work.

Thankfully, the shower is one of the ones nearest the huge tile stove that covers one of the side-walls of the shower room entirely. Yuuri can feel its heat on his back as he works the pump - a blessing, since the water in the showers is _freezing cold,_ raising shivering gooseflesh on the skin of Yuuri’s arms where he is flecked by droplets of the spray _._ Rainwater, meltwater and groundwater seeping through a system in the cliff provides most of the water for the nidus, going, firstly, to fill the safety tanks located by the sky-door and in each den hall - which get used to fill the dragons’ water troughs more so than putting out fires, thankfully -, and then on to supply water for the kitchens, various other pumps throughout the nidus, and the dorms’ showers. (Yuuri can only remember one occasion when the water ran out: a particularly hot day the summer before after a week of heat. There had still been enough water in the tanks for the dragons and for emergencies, but the pumps used for people to get water had run dry. Since the Winter Palace had also been running short the go-ahead had quickly been given for eight of the _Konvoi_ ’s heavyweights to bring up water in great containers from the Neva river, running through Moyka, the dragons flying in pairs with one container carried by each pair, two trips there and back each.)

When the man he is helping has finished showering, Yuuri gives him a few minutes to quickly rub himself dry and wrap himself in his towel. Yuuri uses the time to finish stripping off his own clothes, and then steps into the shower with his bottle of unscented soft soap. (His little lozenge of bar soap, made with olive and cocoa oil and scented with wintergreen, almond and bergamot, is too expensive and precious to waste on daily ablutions. It is still wrapped in the silk paper that Yuuri had bought it in, for Yuuri has only used it a handful of times since he got it - nearly all of them balls at the palace, and once when Yuuri failed the _Konvoi_ ’s trials, since he had been determined that, if he was going to be executed for almost squashing the tsar’s mother with a dragon, he was at least going to die smelling nice.)

Standing under the frigid water, Yuuri seriously misses his parents’ onsen and its balmy heat. Yuuri soaps and scrubs himself clean as quickly as possible, and then gets out of the shower to scrub himself dry with his towel just as quickly, murmuring a shivering _thank you_ to the man who had assisted him and trying not to bump into anyone else nearby. He has to move out of the way to get redressed - someone else already needs the shower beside him -, but Yuuri leaves the shower room as soon as he is covered, soap and towel tucked into the crook of one arm and his hair still wet through the absent rake of the fingers of his other hand.

At the door to his private room, the call of his name behind him makes him pause.

“Chris!” Yuuri finds himself smiling - and does not question whether it’s in genuine pleasure to see a friend or relief at being offered a good distraction - at the sight of the long-legged lieutenant colonel in question striding down the hallway of the dorms towards him, turning obligingly on his foot and tipping up his chin so Chris can drop the kisses he always places in greeting on both of Yuuri’s cheeks. Despite the large covered basket on his arm and Yuuri’s own load, Chris makes the motion look effortless. “Weren’t you working this evening?”

Chris - Christophe, actually, but Chris to friends -, sans his jacket but still wearing the rest of his dark green _Konvoi_ uniform, shrugs affably, leaning back on the heels of his boots to give Yuuri back his personal space now their greeting is done. “I swapped a shift with Georgi; our most royal and imperial showpony had to reschedule a meeting with the State Council because the Grand Prince was late, and we all know how much those old blowhards hate me sitting in on one of _those._ ”

Yuuri bites his tongue on the injured and incredulous _still?_ that sits upon it. It would do no good to voice the obvious; Chris already knows Yuuri sympathises with him, and Chris is already working towards improving the situation for himself and others like him simply by being himself: positive, competent, and present. Hailing from Elvetia, Chris is the only foreign-born member of the Imperial Guard: the inner circle that surrounds and protects the tsar and his family, hand-picked from the Tsar’s Own Escort or _Konvoi._ He has to, therefore, live every day proving himself to the more conservative members of the palace, showing that he deserves to be there.

(Yuuri, at least, had been born in Hasetsu, which is now part of the Rassvetan Empire - even if it had only been that way, officially, for the past seventeen years. He is still considered, by law, Rassvetan-born, and has less obstacles put in his way than Chris does.)

Something of Yuuri’s thoughts must cross his face, for Chris’ green eyes soften with gratitude. “Come now, Yuuri. Would you really make a man seeking shelter in your walls talk about work on his evening off?” He lifts his arm up higher, letting the basket on it slightly, pendulously, swing. “I bring you many delightful things to pay for my passage.”

Yuuri eyes him, lifting up a hand to rub at some of the stray droplets of water still running down the back of his neck and into his shirt. He really should have towelled his hair some more before leaving the showers. “Pear brandy?”

“And apple tarts.”

“You _are_ trying to bribe me.”

“A wise man pays well for such lovely company,” Chris says with all the gravitas of an ancient sage, and ruins it all and Yuuri’s burgeoning blushes by adding, salaciously waggling eyebrows and all: “Now, if only I could find the one bribe that would get me into your bed.”

Still a little pink, Yuuri laughs. Despite a few playful kisses between them, he had stopped taking Chris’ flirtations seriously after the first month knowing the older man (though it had been a month full of furious blushing and gaping like a fish on Yuuri’s part), for Chris, blond, handsome and impossible, flirts easily, widely, and with no rancour at a friendly rebuff. “If you have need of it, Chris, you are more than welcome in my bed - just not with my company.”

Chris drops his shoulders with a melodramatic sigh, following on Yuuri’s heels when Yuuri opens the door to his room and goes inside, looking for all the world like a forlorn and droopy peacock. “Yours is a cruel beauty, _mon chou_.”

“I have honey cakes,” says Yuuri, and trots over to place his forever-prepped kettle on his stove. Chris is a familiar guest to Yuuri’s chamber, and knows to take off his boots after shutting the door and to simply move any pieces of flyaway papers covered in Yuuri’s art and handwriting that he finds back to the chaos that is Yuuri’s desk and the wall above it. “Do you want some genmaicha with them before we hit your brandy?”

“I would not be opposed,” says Chris, and deposits himself at Yuuri’s table in the least-battered chair (so designated because it is the last one left in the room whose cushions at least pretend they have some padding in them other than air, though nine-tenths of that air leaves out the gaps in the seams with a dramatic _whoosh_ under Chris’ weight). “I have something you may be more interested in than the brandy first though.”

“Oh?” Yuuri turns from the stove - and immediately lights up at the sight of the off-white featherweight dragon that is now curled up in the crook of one of Chris’ strong forearms. _“Oh!”_ He has crossed the room again before even thinking about it, his eyes set only on the dragon and his hands already reaching. “May I?”

“Be my guest,” says Chris, affable as always, though Yuuri notes somewhat distantly that the other man sounds distracted.

All that matters in that moment, however, is that Chris lifts his elbow and nudges the sleepy-looking dragon there over into Yuuri’s eager hands, the featherweight stepping onto Yuuri’s braced forearm with all the delicacy and twice the weight of a cat. Yuuri coos at them as the little dragon flares out their wings to aid in finding their balance on their new perch, carefully bringing his hand up before the dragon’s eyes before daring to rub a gentle fingertip along their smooth snout. Drawing the featherweight in closer to Yuuri’s chest eases some of the weight on Yuuri’s shoulder, and Yuuri beams in pleasure when tiny talons lightly dig into his shirt, the dragon in his arms deliberately angling their chin so Yuuri’s finger will scratch under their jaw.

“...Oh,” Chris says, breaking through Yuuri’s preoccupation with his newest little friend with a great melodramatic sigh, “to be a dragon.”

Yuuri glances up at him, bewildered.

“Never mind, darling.” Chris just smiles, so Yuuri lets his confusion ebb away. Chris is prone to coming out with odd things at times, often only speaking aloud the last thought that occurs to him after hours of meditating upon topics others had never been privy to in the first place. (Just another part of his _mature_ personality, according to him - and he had lamented quite loudly to anyone that would listen the one time Prince Yuri had overheard him and announced it was less a sign of _maturity_ and more a sign that Chris was going senile. Apparently Chris’ offended face had been such a wonder the tsar had taken one look at him and started laughing so hard he’d gotten hiccups.) “You almost seem happier than _I_ am that I finally received my licence.”

Featherweight breeds are the most common type of dragons, to the point where nearly one in three households has at least one featherweight dragon under their roof. They aren’t difficult to feed, provided one can afford cheap meat, dairy or fish, and eat just a little more than any other family pet, since the average size for a featherweight is that of an adult cat - though the very largest some rarer breeds come is roughly equal to the size of a medium-large dog. The price of their care is frequently worth it: featherweight dragons make good carriers of messages and small deliveries, hunters of small game and household pests, defenders of property, and the fire-breathing breeds can be used both (obviously) as fire-starters and as small portable heaters when they drape themselves around your neck.

The last trick is a favourite of the little featherweight Hearthstone dragon, Panko, that belongs to Yuuri’s parents. Yuuri had lost count long before he could even walk the amount of times their little family featherweight had draped itself around Yuuri to keep the baby of the household warm in winter, Panko’s chubby little body throwing off heat like a child-proofed hibachi and lulling Yuuri into a warm and easy sleep no matter the winter blizzards outside.

(Everybody who meets Panko loves Panko. Panko is small, terribly friendly, terribly chubby, and fond of treats and laps and draping around the shoulders of Yuuri’s mother when she cooks.

The only drawback anyone had ever had to Panko is that Panko is not a very _dignified_ name for a dragon - even a featherweight dragon. Yuuri’s father loves to mention how, when they had first gotten Panko, he and Hiroko had called their new dragon _Hishibaito,_ combining the characters for caltrop ash - since Panko, when warm, is tinged a lovely warm reddish brown - with the character for _soar,_ or _fly._

Instead of developing the nature that a rather noble name like Hishibaito might conjure up and remembering to deliver half the letters Toshiya had been trying to train him to take to their neighbours in Hasetsu, the not-yet-Panko had instead preoccupied himself with wiggling in Mari’s small lap asking for bellyrubs and toddling around after Hiroko Katsuki’s heels in the kitchen, shamelessly begging for the breaded pork being cooked on the stove. Mari had been delighted, Hiroko had laughed and indulged him - and Toshiya had given in. _Hishibaito_ had become _Panko,_ who is to this day really less reddish brown most of the time and more a happy light ochre.

Yuuri, who had been a particularly chubby child and rather forlorn about it when poked in the belly, had empathised very strongly with Panko. He had spent half his childhood being teased by Mari that they were going to rename _Yuuri_ after his favourite food, since they had learnt it was so easy renaming a dragon.)

However, despite their commonness and usefulness, all featherweight dragons brought into a Rassvetan palace or naval/military encampment of any kind require a special licence from the Head of Staff. Even ignoring the fire-breathers and other speciality breeds, there is no getting around the fact nearly all dragons have extremely sharp fangs and claws: a dragon can tear a man’s throat out, and so each dragon must be accounted for.

Chris had applied for a licence for a featherweight _months_ ago, telling Yuuri then with some pleasure about the egg his former mentor in Elvetia, Josef, had procured for him of one of the local breeds as a birthday gift. The bureaucrats, however, had dragged their heels about one of the tsar’s closest guards having what is essentially a lethal weapon ready to leap for His Imperial Majesty’s swan-like neck at a mere nod - although that argument had proven to be just another way to make Chris’ life difficult when those self-same bureaucrats had approved the application put in by another imperial guard even _closer_ to the tsar, Colonel Popovich, in less than a week just the previous month.

 _Politely_ \- and oh, can Chris be dangerous when he is _polite -_ Chris had appealed to both his superior, Popovich, and the tsar himself. Popovich had been suitably aghast and sent the Head of Staff a dramatic letter, whilst the tsar, rumour has it, had burst into the Head of Staff’s office and announced that Chris simply _had_ to be cleared to have a featherweight dragon, at once, immediately, because the tsar’s neck was far too pretty and important to get torn out by a featherweight belonging to anyone _less_ than the rank of a lieutenant colonel and so Chris _needed_ one. (Infuriatingly, no-one will either confirm or deny if this is _exactly_ what happened, except to say that three secretaries had definitely cried and the tsar had spent the next week walking around in gowns with necklines so low a visiting baron’s wife had swooned into an ornamental plant-pot.)

And now Chris has his featherweight at last. The dragon is a beautiful creature, the colour of skimmed milk all over with a gold-cream tinge where the candlelight passes, softly, through the delicate webbing of their wings. They have a lithe, streamlined shape, narrow and with low surface area to avoid too much heat loss in the cold, though their snout is quite long compared to the rest of their skull, giving them a rather _blasé_ countenance. The radial wing bones are tipped with a ‘thumb’ claw whilst the phalanges of their wings are tipped with claws: all to help the little dragon manoeuvre better in their native environment, scrambling on uncertain mountainous ground.

All-in-all, the dragon is both a sensibly and charmingly built breed, and when they, still sleepy and cuddled up against Yuuri’s chest, open up their jaw in a perfect little yawn that lets Yuuri see their perfect little pink tongue and all of their tiny sharp teeth, Yuuri is completely smitten and fully prepared to fight anyone who says anything at all that is less than gushing praise about them and their owner.

Over genmaicha, honey cakes, some sweet senbei Yuuri finds at the back of his cupboard, apple tarts and pear brandy, Chris makes the introductions, careful to impress Yuuri’s name upon the dragon’s mind so the little one will always know who to look for should Chris need to send them - _him_ , it turns out, Chris saving Yuuri the bother of scratched arms to sex his new friend - to Yuuri with a message.

The dragon’s name, however, has Yuuri mystified.

“Moitié-Moitié.” Chris seems terribly amused.

Now sitting at the table with Chris, busy feeding Moitié-Moitié chunks of cold sausage that Chris had brought rather than eating anything himself, Yuuri slowly admits: “...I feel like I’m missing something.”

“It’s a terrible joke. I wanted to call him Josef at first, but Josef threatened to come out here and eviscerate me in person if I did that. So: Moitie-Moitié. It means half-and-half, since this little one is less than half the size of _ma belle_ Perchta, and more than half makes up for it with his attitude.”

Perchta, Chris’ official _Konvoi_ dragon and a heavyweight Blanche-Queue, is approximately the size of the average _house_ down in Moyka, and can comfortably fit at least three grown adults under the claws of just one of her feet.

Yuuri blinks, reaching for his cup of pear brandy - which Chris insists on keeping topped up. (The genmaicha has long since all been drunk.) “...That’s a joke?”

“No, the joke is it’s also the name of a type of fondue I love back in Elvetia.” Chris grins at him, leaning forward a little over the table between them, elbows on the wood. Yuuri’s poor dilapidated table creaks in complaint, and the nigh-empty bottle of brandy on its surface wobbles. “Don’t you think he looks like cheese?”

“There’s definitely something cheesy around here,” Yuuri says, smiling a little helplessly even as his forehead creases at the terrible pun, “but I’m not sure it’s the _dragon_.” He has to pause there after a deep swallow of his drink, because Moitié-Moitié has grown impatient at the unacceptable length of time it has taken Yuuri to pick up another chunk of sausage and feed it to him and is expressing this impatience by very carefully _just_ digging his teeth into Yuuri’s forefinger. Teeth removed and sausage deposited in hungry featherweight’s reach instead, Yuuri inquires: “He’s a Spindrift, right? I don’t know what you call them locally in Elvetia; I’ve only seen one of these beauties once before.”

 _“Embruns,_ ” says Chris. “ _Embrun_ is the singular.”

“ _Embrun,_ ” Yuuri murmurs, turning the Elvetian word over on his tongue. It tastes more like softly falling snowflakes than the crisp white blankets that lay themselves out over the tops of mountains, sweet from the brandy, senbei, apples and honey still sticky around Yuuri’s mouth. “It means the same?”

“More research for your writings?” Loose-limbed, Yuuri shrugs, uncomfortable and deliberately focusing on the dragon in his arms rather than the keenness of Chris’ gaze. Chris, to his eternal good merit, moves on. “Both words describe similar phenomena, but there is… _hm._ Spindrift refers to the spray the breed tosses up when they fly over snow or water, like waves, or snow or sand blown by wind. They like to fly just above the surface of the ground; when it snows, you can see them only by the little flurries of powder blown up by their wings. _Embrun_ is a reference to fluffy, spindrift clouds, so, you see, the meaning between languages is.” Chris gestures when Yuuri glances up at him again, his hand twirling too fast for the blurriness of Yuuri’s gaze as he parses through his own thoughts. “Similar, but not exact.”

Yuuri thanks him, and the conversation moves on to the lack of Yuuri’s glasses on his face - because of _course_ Chris would notice that. Yuuri does not _lie,_ precisely, but he does only admit to their loss being _‘the same thing that always happens. Dragons._ ’ His next free day is the day after tomorrow, which Yuuri will have to spend down in Moyka at the optometrist’s and optician’s getting a replacement pair.

Chris, it turns out, has the morning of the same day free as well, so he extorts a promise from Yuuri that they will both call in at the confectioner’s together and waste a terrible amount of their wages on moulded cream ices and marzipan sweetmeats.

Yuuri, in turn, makes Chris promise that he will visit again with Moitié-Moitié so that Yuuri can draw the little Spindrift in detail. (Whether the drawing is useful to Yuuri’s writings or not, Yuuri is not going to overlook the opportunity whilst he has it in front of him.)

When Chris and Moitié-Moitié leave, much, much later, Yuuri’s room seems too quiet, silent apart from the sounds of the fire crackling in his stove and distant conversations somewhere in the dorms. Chris, ever a good guest, had left most of the food and the last of the pear brandy that he had brought with him, and Yuuri half-heartedly tries to eat an apple tart, aware he hasn’t had much to eat that evening. His stomach feels too hot, too tight, for food though, so Yuuri puts down the tart again after one bite and picks up the brandy again. Making more tea feels like too much effort, and the bottle and his cup are already to hand.

Yuuri drinks as he cleans up his room, if only to give his hands something to do, and then drinks after he has finished cleaning up his room, because he has nothing else to do when he doesn’t want to think too much about his day or the work and unfinished letters on his desk. The brandy is hot and smooth and sweet going down his throat, and it fills his belly with warmth and his head with his heartbeat, a slow thumping echoing in the darkness behind his closed eyes that _almost_ sounds as believable as the rush Yuuri had felt earlier that day, the wind shrieking past him at dizzy heights on dragonback. How long has it been since he last flew like that?

(Yuuri knows exactly how long it has been since he last flew like that. The date is marked on a grave in the honoured Tranquil Grounds in Heian-kyō, in the Empire of Fusau.)

Now, in almost-silence, Yuuri’s heartbeat feels too big for his head. Tired, with his thoughts tending towards grim melancholy and not a lot of food in his belly, drinking more alcohol is probably not a good idea.

 _(“Master Katsuki, why have you only applied to join the_ Konvoi _once?”)_

Yuuri finishes the bottle of pear brandy anyway. And then goes to his stores to find something else.

**Author's Note:**

> My usual haunting grounds are on tumblr. You can prod me at [shachaai](shachaai.tumblr.com).


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